1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to video and audio transmission systems performed by computers, and in particular, to conversion of video and audio to a streaming slide show.
2. Description of Related Art
For nearly half a century computers have been used by businesses to manage information such as numbers and text, mainly in the form of coded data. However, business data represents only a small part of the world""s information. As storage, communication and information processing technologies advance, and as their costs come down, it becomes more feasible to digitize other types of data, store large volumes of it, and be able to distribute it on demand to users at their place of business or home via a network.
New digitization technologies have emerged in the last decade to digitize images, audio, and video, giving birth to a new type of digital multimedia information. These multimedia objects are quite different from the business data that computers managed in the past, and often require more advanced information management system infrastructures with new capabilities.
Multimedia data is typically not fully pre-structured (i.e., its use is not fully predictable) because it is the result of the creation of a human being or the digitization of an object of the real world (e.g., movies). The digitization of multimedia information (image, audio, video) produces a large set of bits called an xe2x80x9cobjectxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9clarge objectxe2x80x9d (LOB) or xe2x80x9cbinary large objectxe2x80x9d (BLOB). For example, a digitization of a movie, even after compression, may take as much as the equivalent of several billions of characters (3-4 GB) to be stored.
As more users are networked together, there is an increase in the storage of multimedia data, such as video and audio data, with transmission of the multimedia data to users via the network. However, full motion-based and/or full resolution videos are by nature large and, therefore, demand high bit rates for transmission over networks or modems. A motion-based video is a series of frames (i.e., a sequence of single still images) that are displayed in a manner that results in an optical illusion of motion, as perceived by a viewer. The bit rate or bandwidth refers to an amount of data that can be transmitted in a given period over a transmission channel (e.g., a network) and is typically represented as bits per second (bps).
The size of a video may result in very long download delays, greatly reduced resolution and quality, and, typically, very small image sizes, which render the original content difficult to view.
Thus, there is a need in the art for an improved technique for transmitting video data.
To overcome the limitations in the prior art described above, and to overcome other limitations that will become apparent upon reading and understanding the present specification, the present invention discloses a method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for conversion of video and audio to a streaming slide show.
According to an embodiment of the invention, a video stored on a data store connected to a computer is processed. Initially, a motion-based video comprised of a series of images is received. One or more images are selected from the motion-based video based on a desired bandwidth for transmission. Then, a streaming slide show is generated using the selected images.